Scott D. Marianno – författare

In April 1888, Andrew Jenson, Danish immigrant and convert to the Mormon faith, received an unexpected invitation from church leaders to speak at their general conference. Jenson was an outsider to this conference tradition, a layman whose only standing before the main body of Latter-day Saints came from a contracted position with the Church Historian's Office.Forty-two years later, in April 1930, Jenson offered his twenty-eighth and final general conference sermon. He had become the voice of institutional record keeping in his over forty-year career as an Assistant Church Historian. His sermons demonstrated the growth and expansion of the Mormon general conference tradition in the twentieth century, as they placed the Latter-day Saint story front and center for church members to learn from and celebrate. In addition, Jenson urged conference goers to keep better personal and institutional records and believed he was often the solitary advocate for church record keeping and historical preservation.A Voice in the Wilderness presents all twenty-eight of Andrew Jenson's general conference sermons, with introductions and annotations that set them within their historical and religious contexts. His speeches capture a unique period in Mormon history, one of institutional change, accommodation, and growth. This study of Jenson's sermons uncovers the richness and diversity that thrives just beneath the surface of official ecclesiastical discourse.

The search for a distinctive Latter-day Saint place carried followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from New York to the western frontier of the United States over the church's first two decades. The prophet-colonizer Brigham Young declared a spot for a temple at the edge of a valley in 1847. He imagined the temple as the centerpiece of a new kingdom headquartered in what would become Salt Lake City, Utah. It took forty years for Young's vision to materialize, and much would change for the religion in the intervening years. The Salt Lake Temple tells the story of the building's transformation from an improvised community project to the premier icon, symbol, and sacred space of a now global religion. Marianno and Neilson examine the evolving meaning and significance of the temple to the present day as the church globalized and built more temples. The Salt Lake Temple explains the shifting interactions between sacred space, identity, and religious meaning, revealing the contemporary importance of a granite temple in the American West to a twenty-first century worldwide religious movement.

Andrew Jenson undertook a lifelong quest to render the LDS historical record complete and comprehensive. As Assistant Church Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jenson tirelessly carried out his office's archival mission and advocated for fixed recordkeeping to become a duty for Latter-day Saints. Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno offer a new in-depth study of Jenson's long life and career. Their account follows Jenson from his arrival as a Danish immigrant to 1860s Utah through trips around the world to secure documents from far-flung missions, and on to his public life as a newspaper columnist and interpreter of LDS history. Throughout, Jenson emerges as a figure dedicated to the belief that recorded history united past and present Latter-day Saints in heaven and on earth--and for all eternity. Engaging and informed, Restless Pilgrim is a groundbreaking study of an important figure in Latter-day Saint intellectual life during a transformative era in Church history.